Now and then something happens in one’s life whose elegance, whose grace, whose aura just can’t be explained. It excedes the art of any individual; it’s more than matter, scale or place.
You may think you can describe it, but often the emotional impact leaves you speechless but for a gasp or a breathy “Wow!” You end up apologizing: You had to be there.
IMAGE: Greg Rakozy / Unsplash
Some folks are uncomfortable when they can’t quantify or explain things, but I rather like it. For one thing, it keeps me humble, reminding me just how limited even a writer’s vocabulary is—not to mention how infinitesimal my place in the Scheme of Things.
And I’m more than okay with what turns out to be both the simplest and most impenetrable description of such awe: It’s magic.
Magic, you see, is not just a quality or an emotional state; it’s a connection. A CONNECTION Of course, that declaration bothers folks whose education, culture and world view all revolve around the tangible. Who believe everything needs a reason, and that if you can’t come up with one you’re either a brick short of a load or just not trying hard enough.
PHOTO: Paramount Pictures / CBS
Well, there’s the catch. Some things, no matter how hard you try, you simply can’t make happen. Sometimes you have to stop trying altogether and let them happen. It’s that way for magic, and that, for many, is very hard indeed.
But that’s exactly where magic is brewed. In that moment when one abandons logic and opens oneself, body and soul, to wonder.
IMAGE: No attribution found
Magic, you see, is not just a quality or an emotional state; it’s a connection. It lies not just in the beguiling thing or event. But, like an electrical circuit, unless the power has someplace to go, it remains mere potential. Until, that is, you emanate your intention, that mystical signal that you are that place.
It’s what makes the Mona Lisa seem illuminated from within.
CASES IN POINT The kind of awe sparked by that cause-and-effect connection may come from something very big or very small, quite obvious or extremely subtle. Let me give you some examples of magic—a couple of them very personal:
Magic is what makes Lionel Messi better than anyone in futbol (soccer).
PHOTO: Kriangkrai Thitimakorn
It’s what makes Starry Night’s sky- scape swirl and the Mona Lisa seem illuminated from within.
It’s the spectacle of 10,000 herring surging back and forth as one.
It’s what lends the Taj Mahal its celebrated powers of seduction.
It’s why a 50-foot gray whale cow swims under her 20-foot calf, lifts and carries it to my extended hand.
BELIEVE Magic is Creation’s sleight of hand. You’ll never figure out how it’s done. You can’t measure it. You can neither time it nor tame it. Most often you can’t even describe it.
Nonetheless, please believe in magic. It lives not just in exotic places; it’s present all around you and even in you. The key is to realize that looking for it usually fails. It will find you if you let it.
ILLUSTRATION: Matthew Burgess and Doug Salati
"Those who don’t believe in magic will never find it." – ROUALD DAHL
I’ve been a river rat since I was nine. That’s when I fell in love with the beautiful St. Croix River, a Natural Scenic River forming the border between Wisconsin and Minnesota for most of its 169-mile length.
I can’t simply run down to the St. Croix and hop in our boat or canoe as I did most summer days as a kid. Nowadays it takes a bit more effort, including a 50-minute drive. But I still manage to tote my gear up there to my put-in spot at Franconia five or six times during the summer.
These river outings in my little 13-foot Mansfield/Stowe Osprey have always been good for my soul, a close connection with Nature and a cherished expression of my independence. But today’s paddle is extraordinary, on as close to a perfect afternoon as I can remember.
By about 6:30, the sun’s slipping on its golden-hour filter, bathing everything in honey light.
A SLOUGH OF NATURE First, the weather’s ideal: upper 70s, sunny with scattered cotton-ball clouds and light breezes. The water level is a bit high. That means very little of the landing’s sand beach is exposed, making embarking and disembarking a bit challenging. And it usually means poor fishing.
But high water also means I can access my favorite slough, a flowing backwater that meanders through the woods on the Wisconsin side for several miles, and which becomes accessible only by portaging once the river drops to its usual summer level.
Going on a weekday, there are fewer people out; I see just a few small groups kayaking and a couple of polite power boats in the main channel.
As usual, I head out at about 2:30, since those five or six remaining hours of daylight are always magical, coaxing out all kinds of wildlife, from orioles to ospreys, muskrats to muskellunge. And by about 6:30, the sun’s slipping on its golden-hour filter, bathing everything in honey light.
BIRD TALK So that’s the setting. Perfect enough, right? But today several other factors contribute to the magic.
One measure of my joy during my river paddles is how much wildlife I get to see. Today, here in the slough, the sense of oneness with Nature is just extraordinary. An eagle soars past at the treetops thirty yards away, a great blue heron flies close enough so I can hear the whisper of the wind on its wings.
Muskrats crisscross the stream, busily tending to their lodges. I don’t see deer this time, but I can hear them in the woods.
I’m far from a bird expert, but I love seeing them, listening to them, trying to imitate them. Today I hear unfamiliar birdsong coming from a dense grove of big trees along the bank. Sifting through memory, I rule out a few bird calls I know well, and come up with a guess: must be orioles. Now I haven’t spotted an oriole for years and have forgotten what they sound like.
PHOTO: Tony Castro
I start replying, and within a minute a dart of orange emerges from the shadows, coming toward me…and then two…and finally a couple more pipe in from deeper in the woods. What a privilege not just to see these spectacular birds, but to communicate with them (saying who knows what)!
Later, I try for another conversation. Nearly always on these evening paddles, I start hearing barred owls’ evocative eight-note incantation in the woods about an hour before dark; most often there are two or more trading calls.
This evening, emboldened by my success with the orioles, I try reaching out to any barred owls who might be within earshot. It’s not perfect, but my low-pitched coo-like whistles do the trick. One of them replies…and then another. I have chills.
SEVEN UP I enjoy fishing. I like catching too, but that’s not essential to the mystical connection with Nature fishing evokes. Most days on the St. Croix the effects of current and wind make bait casting from a canoe quite challenging; I get one, maybe two, quick casts before I’m either turned completely around or barreling toward the rocky shore.
Today, though, the light breeze and moderate current are in near-perfect balance, managing to hold me in place or even move me gradually upstream—a perfect pace for covering a new spot along the shore with each cast.
This spiny, mauve, shark-skinned beauty is thought
to have appeared in the biota some 100 million years ago.
Usually, my fishing time on the river is punctuated with little, under-my-breath curses when I’m struggling with stronger winds or when my little Mepps Spinner snags on a stone or log, or, worse, catches an overhanging tree limb. Today, incredibly, I do all the usual target practice on submerged structure all afternoon, and without a single snag.
Now here’s the most amazing part. My average day fishing on the St. Croix might produce a few small fish, usually pike or smallmouth bass. Today, despite the high water, I catch seven fish, each a different species. Exactly one each of sunfish, crappie, yellow perch, rock bass, smallie, northern pike and sturgeon. Do you know how extraordinary that is?
Of those, the perch is one I seldom see on the river. (I worry that, since they love aquatic weeds, maybe that means the St. Croix’s waters are warming.)
But the most exotic by far is the sturgeon. This spiny, mauve, shark-skinned beauty is like a living fossil, thought to have appeared in the biota some 100 million years ago. Catching one—even a 20-inch youngster like this—always leaves me in awe.
BETTER THAN DEET Finally, I can’t recount a summer evening on the St. Croix without mentioning our Minnesota “state bird,” the mosquito. We’ve had plenty of rain lately and temperatures are ideal for mosquito procreation. And, with little wind, I’d expected to be mobbed by the little assassins.
VIDEO: LaiTimes
But not today. Whatever this magical spell that seems to envelop me, it’s working better than 100 percent DEET. Nearly all afternoon I’m surrounded with a squadron of dapper dragonflies using me as bait and gobbling up the skeeters before they can land. I ask you, is that not a perfect example of synergy?
I allowed myself the lightness of being that allows wonder.
DISTILLED SPIRITS Serendipity is, by definition, elusive, impossible to replicate. We’d love, wouldn’t we, to be able to catch it, bottle it and open it another time. Alas, we can’t make it happen.
Like so many of Nature’s small wonders, it’s not all about what you actually see or do or even what happens to you. A big part of serendipity is about how and where your spirit is when you’re there. As I'm wont to say in these jottings, you see pretty much what you expect to see.
The spirits of some folks I know are like magnets for wonder. They seem always to be in a place that’s wide open to curiosity and awe…and, yes, serendipity. For me, it can be a little harder. Too often I get stuck in my routines; I impose limits on myself when I needn’t; I’m too serious.
So today, this magical, near-perfect day on the St. Croix River, only happened because Nature and I happened to be on the same page. My worries were few; my filters were turned off; my senses were tuned in; and I allowed myself the lightness of being that allows wonder.
When I was a kid, Halloween meant what I suppose it did to most kids. Dressing up as something clever and fun, carving jack-o-lanterns, working the neighborhood for treats... Okay, and maybe pulling off a couple of pranks.
I collected the usual assortment of goodies. My favorites were the much-coveted full-size Snickers bars or Almond Joys a couple of families handed out. I think I also got an ice cream bar once. The treats I always tried to trade away: licorice, Raisinets, taffy, and the iconic-for-all-the-wrong-reasons candy corn.
But of all the houses I solicited, however rewarding candy-wise, one stood out. Miss Joy’s house. Lillian Joy was an engaging senior citizen with a twinkle in her eye. I knew her because she was active in my family’s church. She was one of those very few really old people I didn’t find kind of icky.
Just the stuff of wonder a kid remembers 65 years later.
It wasn’t that her decorations were all that spooky, and I don’t think she handed out anything that memorable. What Miss Joy did hand out was an experience.
Each Halloween, with the help of a couple of friends, she invited each group of kids, a few at a time, into her grand old Victorian home—to the dining room I think it was—where the magic began.
To earn one’s treat, each child had to sit down at the table and execute a couple of challenging little hand/mind games. The one I remember best is struggling to draw a circle on a sheet of paper while looking only at a mirror reflection of the effort. (It’s really hard!)
It didn’t really matter if you were successful, just that you gave it a go. Then Miss Joy would invite you over to the sideboard, where there sat a fancy silver double chafing dish.
She’d show you the pans were empty, then put the cover back and perform an elaborate little incantation. When she opened it again, there was your treat, a couple pieces of candy.
Seriously, the thing was just empty 30 seconds ago! Just the stuff of wonder a kid remembers 65 years later.
What magical Halloween experiences do you remember fondly?
(In my previous Why I Wonder post, I likened wonder to a path where the starting point is the essential, childlike curiosity with which each of us was born; the destination, an indeterminate point where we start to recognize the spiritual meaning of that curiosity and the portals to wisdom and grace it opens for us.)
Trying to talk about this mystical aspect of wonder is where some people's eyes start to glaze over. But it's not that complicated. In fact,it's actually the opposite. That's why kids are so good at wonder. Their minds and spirits are still relatively pure, their original circuitry for joy and wonder less likely to have been drained of juice—shorted out if you will—by culturally imposed expectation, prejudice and cynicism. It's why, with kids, it's often so easy to see the exact moment when simple amusement turns to magic.
For most of us adults, child-like wonder is something we have to come back to after years or decades of its deprivation.
What children may not fully appreciate about such joy and magic—and this is one of the few advantages adulthood holds over childhood when it comes to wonder—are the deeper redemptive qualities they possess. I suppose it’s like the notion of not being able to fully appreciate something—beauty, love, freedom…fill in the blank—until you’ve faced living without it.
For most of us adults, child-like wonder is something we have to come back to after years or decades of its deprivation at the hands of overwork, over-thinking, preoccupation, ambition, and the other joy robbers in our busy lives.
Every step along the path of wonder is nothing more or less than what we make it. For some it's very deliberate; for others it takes on a life of its own. The latter approach—again, one which children model quite well—is worth cultivating if we want to explore the limits of our capacity for awe.
You've heard me say this before: in general, we see what we expect to see. This is as true in our own disposition as it is in Nature. When I lift up a leaf to see what’s under it, I don’t do that because I expect to find nothing.
By the same token, when I’m getting to know someone, if I’m to come down from the intoxication of telling my own story long enough to ask them about theirs, it sure helps if I believe their story might surprise and delight me. And, even in getting to know myself, if I start rolling back a layer of doubt, regret or anger to see what’s there, I always feel better—and learn more, it seems—when I expect it’s going to be something good.
I know this place where curiosity and faith meet has something to do with the essential meaning of life.
So you see there’s a strong element of faith in the kind of wonder I've tried to cultivate for myself and teach those who want to learn it. I can think of no more cogent way of putting it than the quote I often cite from former National Geographic photographer Dewitt Jones. In a short film he made to help business executives tap into their latent creativity, he twisted an old maxim, saying that sometimes "you have to believe it to see it."
This is why I wonder. I know—catching the purest sense of it only in fleeting epiphanies—that this place where curiosity and faith meet has something to do with the ultimate secret of happiness, the essential meaning of life.
In so many ways the world I experience—Nature, other people, life’s situations—is a reflection of who I am. This can be both humbling and empowering. It supports my conviction that seeing with wonder is actually more about what you give to the experience than what you get from it. It’s a notion I call "seeing generously."
What does that term, seeing generously, mean to you? Do you see life that way?
(Watch for the next post in the Why I Wonder series: Seeing Generously)
I guess it all started with the moon and stars. Ancient man found those celestial lights a great source of wonder. Now and then, when things got a little more exotic (like eclipses and northern lights), wonder turned to fear.
But when you're a kid, most such fears are, as yet, unlearned. And things like awe and wonder tend to fall a little closer to home.
We hung over the bow railing and saw our bow waves filled with millions of little blue- green pinpoints of light
SMEARS OF LIGHT AND LIFE
I'll never forget the first time I encountered fireflies. While living at our family’s summer house, I’d find them on those cricket-pulsing, sultry nights in the hay fields down by the St. Croix River. My parents let me keep a few in a jar. From this I learned not just about phosphorescence, but also a little about life and death.
I'm not proud of this, but, as a ten-year-old boy, my curiosity sometimes trumped respect. My experiments with fireflies included squashing them and rubbing the glowing goo on my clothes, where it shone for a few seconds longer than the poor creatures’ lives.
HYPNOTIZED IN THE SEA OF CORTEZ
My wife’s dad was a navy man. He’s told us of seeing the entire wake of his minesweeper aglow with phosphorescent plankton stirred up by the vessel’s night passage through the South Pacific.
I thought that experience, as phosphorescence stories go, would surely have to take the cake. Until, that is, my wife and I were lucky enough to discover the Searcher and its fantastic natural history cruises from San Diego around the Baja Peninsula.
Late one night, while we were motoring in the calm, deserted Sea of Cortez, the captain of the 95-foot boat came on the P.A. system and announced that he and the crew were seeing some good phosphorescence from the bridge and that we might want to head out on deck to check it out.
The glow of a single firefly can be your ticket to wonder.
Maintaining cruising speed, he turned off the Searcher’s lights. In near-total darkness, we and our 20 or so fellow passengers hung over the bow railing, looked down and saw our bow waves filled with millions of little blue-green pinpoints of light, enough to completely light up not just the water, but the sides of the hull as well. It was absolutely mesmerizing. We watched in reverent silence for nearly 20 minutes.
As some of our fellow travelers headed back inside, Sally and I still couldn’t get enough of the hypnotic glow and gurgle of those bow waves. Suddenly, several large streaks of churning light emerged, like so many comets, from the watery darkness on both sides of the boat and streaked toward the bow.
VIDEO: Imgur.com
The dolphins, like the Searcher, ignited the plankton, which shrouded them in light, leaving 20- to 30-foot glowing, swirling trails. These delightful creatures seemed to know this would thrill us even more than their daytime antics, weaving, twisting and jumping with an extra measure of exuberance.
After about ten minutes lacing in and out of our bow waves, our living comets peeled off from the bow one by one and launched themselves back into their own deep, dark universe.
HAVE YOU SEEN THE LIGHT?
We were so fortunate to have been in the right place at the right time for such a powerful, magical experience! But one needn't witness a celestial dolphin light show in the Sea of Cortez to appreciate the wonder of phosphorescence. If you let it, the glow of a single firefly can be your ticket to wonder.
Have you had any magical encounters with phosphorescence?
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